Kant's Elliptical Path

Here Ameriks collects essays from 2008–12: three new, twelve published (revised and updated), all thoughtful, substantive contributions to Kant studies and to continuing debates in post-Kantianism. Ameriks's introduction helpfully sets out his overarching ambitions and gives summaries of each piece. The first dozen focus primarily on interpreting and defending key aspects of Kant's system, with Ameriks responding to critical engagements by Kant's contemporaries (Herder, Jacobi, Reinhold, Schleiermacher) and recent interpreters (Hanna, Kleingeld, Kuehn, Langton, Sussman, Velleman, Wood). The last three turn to the complicated inheritance of Kantian themes in Hölderlin, Novalis, Nietzsche, and Rorty.The label “elliptical path” is meant primarily to capture Ameriks's sense of the surprising deep-level continuity underlying Kant's philosophy after encountering Rousseau in the 1760s. Despite surface-level “eccentricities,” Kant's “most fundamental views did not radically change” (1) afterward, the Critique's so-called Copernican revolution notwithstanding. Kant's chief “focal points” are the natural laws governing “the starry heavens above” and “the moral law” governing our freedom “within,” with his path tracing out conceptual and epistemic space for upholding the joint validity of both laws, without lapsing into either incoherence or un-Enlightened appeals to “divine interference” (4). Yet, for Ameriks (and more controversially), Kant also maintains a second orientation point—namely, certain “common sense,” presystematic beliefs: “contrary to what has often been thought, Kant, in his starting points, places a great reliance, above all, on common sense” (53). These include “an innocent pre-reflective commitment” that “objects are given to us” (10), that “we share a common space and time and mathematics” (54), “that we are distinct from other substances” (134), that we all share “a basic respect for rationality” (10), and that “the force of pure morality” is “a ‘fact’ that is an inescapable starting point for any ‘honest person’” (13).Ameriks sees Kant's more familiar innovations as pushing his “path” into an elliptical orbit, as his writing moves “away from and then back to” these commitments (Kant's “original position”) “only after the complications of moving, with some eccentricity, out further along one axis” (1). Kant's “revolutionary” metaphysical thesis of transcendental idealism becomes one such eccentric episode, rather than a focal point unto itself, one requiring some “modifying” and “fine-tuning” elsewhere in his system, but with “the overall shape of his philosophical path remain[ing] the same” (2). Hence, even in the Critical period, Kant consistently retains an “underlying commonsense and realist stance” (164n10). In fact, Ameriks claims Kant's “introduction of transcendental idealism, like his Critical system in general” should be viewed “as largely an instrument for theoretically safeguarding a reflective turn back to the fundamental end” he had long embraced (3)—that is, as “an ideal means . . . to fill out a systematic defense that allowed for a return to his deepest pre-systematic beliefs” (1).Accordingly, Ameriks gives a “moderate” reading of transcendental idealism itself, on which Kant ultimately remains “a kind of plausible realist in a significant epistemological and metaphysical sense” (8). Kant departs from constructivisms by accepting straightaway (without addressing radical skepticism) that there are transcendentally real things beyond both acts of representing and those represented objects that Kant claims are transcendentally ideal (space, time, and all the “appearances” occupying them)—realities such as our own soul and whatever other things “affect” us to cause our intuitions of inner and outer appearances, respectively. Kant also is more “realist” about appearances themselves, by embracing a “‘weighty’ positive understanding of ‘appearance’” (9). Rather than having “merely subjective,” private existence in some individual's mind (76), as in deflationary phenomenalisms, Kant's appearances are “public and objective spatiotemporal realities” (107)—“public” since “in principle accessible to [any] sensible mind like ours” (76), and “objective” in that they enjoy an “irreducible reality” (94) vis-à-vis what is fully dependent on individual subjectivities. Appearances are not, however, as fully objective (independent) as transcendental realities, and their “ideality” comes from being “simultaneously subjective and objective,” since they “involve both an actual way that a thing phenomenally appears to the minds of beings like us, and also a kind of disposition belonging to the thing as an empirical object, that is, with a specific kind of surface that in a specific kind of circumstances always would appear in a specific kind of way” (114). Against simple one- or two-world accounts, then, Ameriks's Kant works with three levels of “irreducible reality”: (1) private, subjective mental states like sensations and feelings and (2) appearances as public, “perceivable,” spatiotemporal objects, like colors (76) and other physical states and substances (“the boat here, then there” [108]), which are constituted by (dispositional) relations between (3) whatever transcendentally real subjects and other things ultimately ground these level-two objects (see 9, 81–82, 94, 107–9, and especially 114–18).While this three-tier framework promises to advance interpretive debates, let me invite Ameriks to say more on two specific issues. First, Kant frequently describes sensations as providing the “matter” for appearances, as what are “ordered” in spatial or temporal form to produce whole appearances (see, for example, B34). On Ameriks's picture, however, this might seem to entail that public, level-two objects (appearances) have private level-one objects (sensations) as their parts. Second, Kant describes appearances as “representations” of those things responsible for bringing about sensations (see, for example, A109, A372), which might suggest that appearances are more like pictures or “images” of things (see, for example, A120), and so items more ontologically distinct from level-three objects than any (relational, dispositional) properties of such objects. Ameriks does note that appearances “point to” or “signify” something “fundamentally more basic” than themselves (see 83, 115, 118), but Ameriks cashes this out through generic, “indeterminate” implication relations: we can conclude from any appearance's existence some level-three object's existence (82). With this, Ameriks means to uphold Kant's alleged prohibition on knowledge that “reveals the positive nature of particular finite things” (84n18; see also 83, 86, 94, 133). Yet Kant seems happy to go some ways beyond wholly generic inferences and claim that certain appearances represent certain affecting things rather than others (for example, represent my own soul [as inner appearances] rather than bodies [as outer appearances]), due to specific phenomenal features (for example, if only temporality and not spatiality is present in them; see B37).Ameriks similarly highlights “realist,” commonsense aspects of Kant's practical philosophy. Against constructivist and humanist interpretations, Ameriks argues that, for Kant, the moral law's content and “authority” (162–63) for humans is not grounded in any concrete act or choice by individuals (Kant's “Willkür”), nor is it grounded in anything peculiar to human nature. Rather, morality's is based solely on the “essence” (160) of “pure reason,” the “pure structure of the will in general (Wille)” (152), something surely present in humanity but also (potentially) in “nonfinite and nonmundane rational beings, including God” (ibid; see also 147, 215). Now, by calling this structure “pure reason,” Ameriks contends that Kant is not referring to mere practical rationality but a more substantive “source of value that authoritatively guides our choices” (193; see, by way of comparison, 38, 186). Ameriks acknowledges Kant's starting point will disappoint readers seeking “progressive,” “bottom-up” deductions of moral principles from (prima facie) nonmoral foundational principles of general rationality (for example, avoid inconsistency; see 157, 165f., 181f.). Kant offers only a “regressive” argument, from “commonsense” beliefs in objective moral laws and duties, to the weaker conclusion that one can coherently maintain these beliefs while accepting both natural science and core Christian beliefs (for example, humanity's radical evil). This argument therefore aims primarily to make moral beliefs “metaphysically and psychologically understandable” (196) and show that “it is at least fully appropriate (in an apologetic and self-defensive rather than imperialistic project) for those who sense that they do in fact hear the voice of reason, to regard that voice as not just one of many voices,” but as the “highest” voice heard (197). Ameriks concedes that Kant's “apology” for allegedly “commonsense” morality ultimately “involves enormously controversial assumptions” about both this “fact” of “hearing” reason and “absolute freedom, moral rules, and the limits of natural explanation” (196). Even so, Kant himself “realizes that he cannot . . . contend that all those who do not share these substantive assumptions can be argumentatively vanquished by the fact of reason, that is, shown to be violating their own basic rationality” (ibid.), and so (again) doesn't offer any “naïve foundationalist” answer to skepticism (291).The book's longest (fourth) section explores Kant's efforts to preserve rationally respectable epistemic leeway for such “belief or faith [Glaube]” (as opposed to “knowledge [Wissen]”) in nonsensible objects like duties and our freedom. This vindicates Ameriks's early claim that the book's theme “very much concerns hope” (vi). Against the deep epistemic pessimism (even nihilism) often inferred from Kant's idealism, Ameriks emphasizes Kant's relative optimism, especially Kant's positive further controversial claims (a) that, in addition to freedom and morality, we are epistemically entitled and even required to believe in a just future in which happiness will be proportioned to virtue, due to the intelligent plan of a “greater being” (15), and (b) that this is a “belief from reason [Vernunftglaube]”—that is, one that is “grounded” epistemically on the “fact” we experience in our consciousness of the purely rational content and unconditional bindingness of morality. Ameriks deftly unpacks Kant's account of how this theologico-teleological “postulate” concerning divine agency is supposed to be compatible with the existence of our own free agency (chapter 9), and how Kant's account of this compatibility differs from Herder's more Aristotelian-naturalistic yet still theologically minded account (chapter 10). He also elucidates Kant's subtle analysis of the act of “postulating” (“holding-true”) the existence of this nonsensible object (teleological intelligence), in order to ask, first, how it differs from “holding-true” the existence of freedom (chapter 11), and, second, whether (as Kant hopes) making sense of this teleology can avoid appeal to “miraculous” acts, like “grace” to enable virtue to overcome radical evil (chapter 12). Here, Ameriks points to Kant's key distinction between knowing the laws of causal powers and knowing the causes themselves, which allows Kant to consistently claim that we know the (moral) law according to which pure practical reason operates without knowing the metaphysical cause of such activity, which might (somehow?) include both freedom and grace together (274). Yet while this allows Kant to consistently claim knowledge of the moral law, Ameriks contends that Kant himself never actually uses “knowledge” to characterize our cognitive relation to the moral law but instead relegates it to a kind of “belief” (see 24, 246–47). Here, however, one thinks of Kant's claims from the second Critique's preface, that our consciousness of the moral law is “the ratio cognoscendi” for freedom (5:4n), and that, in virtue of such consciousness, freedom is the single object of pure reason whose real possibility we “know [wissen]” (5:4). When combined with similar passages from the third Critique (noted by Ameriks himself) where Kant straightforwardly describes our freedom as “something knowable [scibile]” and “established through practical laws” (5:468), this all suggests that Kant already accepts Ameriks's recommendation that Kant should have counted it as knowledge (250).The final essays examine what Ameriks proposes “may well be the most striking philosophical characterization of [the post-Kantian] era as a whole” (324)—namely, as the era of the hermeneutical turn, away from timeless deductions of first principles, toward historico-“progressive” narratives (329), often aesthetically infused with poetical and dramatic elements (Novalis, Hölderlin, Nietzsche), aiming to achieve “imaginative” reinterpretations (“misreadings” à la Bloom) which understand our immediate philosophical predecessors better than they understood themselves. Despite its surface-level eccentricity away from reason, Ameriks finds a deeper commitment to “get it right” (pace Rorty) concerning the stakes of earlier projects and thereby “liberate the relevant living kernel, or lesson, in the old shell of the earlier systems” (329–30).Ameriks does not ultimately defend either Kant's own resolution of philosophy through rational belief (hope) or the subsequent hermeneutical approach against the other, or against currently prominent (for example, experimental-scientific) alternatives—though he does suggest that, after Nietzsche, at least concerning morality, “Kantian Vernunftglaube and nihilism can seem to be the main alternatives left” (201n77). Readers will have to wait for a future occasion for that surely productive encounter

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